Oh Deer, Oh Deer!!

This morning I was inspired to write about nature. You see, I went outside to get the newspapers — I read the local Troy Record and the Wall Street Journal every morning — and the sky was full of Canadian geese. They stop here for several weeks on their migration south for the winter. This area is quite rural and we have a large reservoir by the house and many corn fields. The kernel packed cobs have already been harvested and placed into silos for safe winter storage and feed for the livestock.

Like clockwork, at 8:30 a.m. the birds take flight from the lake and fly overhead to spend the day feasting in the corn fields on whatever remaining tidbits they can find. At 5:00 p.m. they return in huge Vees, by the thousands, to the lake where they spend the night and foul (pun intended) the water...but that's a story for spring time when they stop back on their way north and it is a crisis worthy of wall-to-wall local news coverage.

Okay, so I've got my coffee, my kitty is on my lap, and I'm preparing to post my regular Monday a.m. diatribe about the neocon a$$hole's article that appeared in Saturday's paper. It's political and I've been very aware that with the elections I need to intersperse some fun stuff on here. So the nature bit will be good for tomorrow, I think to myself.

Except! Except as I'm leaving a comment on a fellow blogger's site And then there is California admiring his photo of the beach in Laguna (oh, the memories), my lap cat sits up and takes notice out the window. And here's my Monday morning view:


Sorry for the pic quality but this was obviously a last minute thing and I had to take them through several panes of windows that are in place for the cold weather. The exciting part is that they are literally 3 feet from me and they don't see me and most importantly can't smell me so they don't feel in danger. But the cat has had enough and scrabbled for cover.

There are two of them and the cute(?) bastards are eating my rose bushes! Argh!!! It was just on Saturday that I was commenting to my neighbor/friend from childhood that something had been nibbling on my rose buds. I was hoping that they would open before the cold weather killed them for sure.


I snuck out the front and around the other side of the house to see if I could snap a better pic of them as they returned to the fields behind our house where they live. Here is what I got with aforementioned friend's leafless Rose of Sharon bush and pool in the background.


It's a long way from California but very cool in its own way. The most wildlife I ever saw in Orange County was flocks of crows (we get 'em here too), flocks of seagulls (we get those here too...the rats of the ocean with no ocean in sight), and a wayward baby possum.

The morning has started out pretty exciting and I've got some adrenaline flowing. Or is that the caffeine?